AWS Well-Architected design considerations

This solution uses the best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps customers design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective workloads in the cloud.

This section describes how the design principles and best practices of the Well-Architected Framework benefit this solution.

Operational excellence

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the operational excellence pillar.

• The solution pushes metrics to CloudWatch to provide observability into the infrastructure, Lambda functions, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon S3 buckets, and the rest of the solution components.

• We develop, test, and publish the solution through an AWS continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This helps developers achieve high quality results consistently.

• You can install the solution with a CloudFormation template that provisions all the required resources in your account. To update or delete the solution, you only need to update or delete the template.

Security

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the security pillar.

• All inter-service communications use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.

• All roles used by the solution follow least-privilege access. In other words, they only contain minimum permissions required so that the service can function properly.

• All data storage, including Amazon S3 buckets and DynamoDB, have encryption at rest.

Reliability

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the reliability pillar.

• The solution uses AWS serverless services wherever possible (for example, Lambda, Firehose, Amazon S3, and Athena) to ensure high availability and recovery from service failure.

• We perform automated tests on the solution to detect and fix errors quickly.

• The solution uses Lambda functions for data processing. The solution stores data in Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, and it persists in multiple Avaialbility Zones by default.

Performance efficiency

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the performance efficiency pillar.

• The solution uses a serverless architecture to ensure high scalability and availability at a reduced cost.

• The solution enhances database performance by parititioning data and optimizing query to reduce the amount of data scanning and achieve faster results.

• The solution is automatically tested and deployed every day. Our solution architects and subject matter experts review the solution for areas to experiment and improve.

Cost optimization

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the cost optimization pillar.

• The solution uses a serverless architecture, and customers pay only for what they use.

• The solution’s compute layer defaults to Lambda, which uses a pay-per-use model.

• The Athena database and queries are optimized to reduce the amount of data scanning, thereby reducing cost.

Sustainability

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the sustainability pillar.

• The solution uses managed and serverless services to minimize the environmental impact of the backend services.

• The solution’s serverless design is aimed at reducing carbon footprint compared to the footprint of continually operating on-premises servers.